Physics Blogging Round-Up: Books, Entanglement, Optics, Many-Worlds, Two Cultures, and Clocks

A whole bunch of physics posts over at Forbes so far this month:

—Recent Physics Books: Gravitational Waves and Brief Lessons: Short reviews of Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.

—The Real Reasons Quantum Entanglement Doesn’t Allow Faster-Than-Light Communication: Expanding on and correcting some stuff I didn’t like about Ethan “Starts With A Bang” Siegel’s take on entanglement as a communications tool.

— Why Does The Rising sun Change Color?: I watched a bunch of sunrises on the cruise, which led to me scribbling equations, and then a blog post.

— How Quantum Entanglement Can Help You Understand Many-Worlds: Entanglement is weird, but serves as a nice concrete system for talking about how decoherence hides quantum behavior without requiring “collapse” into a single well-defined state.

— How Even Research That Sounds Silly Has Value: Kind of a weird thinkpiece, because that’s the sort of mood I was in.

— Why Do Physicists Want A “Nuclear Clock”?: A story about a key step toward making a clock based on a nuclear isomer transition in thorium-229 caught my eye, so I tried to explain why that’s cool.

— Historians and Astronomers Share These Scientific Methods In Common: A neat project based on digitizing ads about fugitive slaves reminded me of some of the things astronomers do, so I wrote about the parallel.

As usual, quite a range of stuff. I’ll be at DAMOP all next week, which may or may not allow time for on-site blogging, but will almost certainly give me some topics to write on when I get back.